Young and the Problem of Pseudo-Oppression

Jennifer Szende
Queen’s University, Kingston, ON
Presented at FEAST Conference 2011
Abstract:
Young’s account of oppression starts from the use of the term by emancipatory
social movements such as the civil rights movement. Young employs Wittgensteinian
methodology including a use theory of meaning. This paper examines the implications
for her work of the adoption of the language of oppression and emancipation by groups
on the far right. Their adoption of the language of oppression affects the meaning of the
term and provides contradictory answers about how to understand such uses of the term.
The example reveals an underlying tension in Young’s argument, and more generally in
language-use arguments for political purposes.
Keywords: use theory of meaning; family resemblance; oppression; Iris Marion Young.

In her chapter “Five Faces of Oppression”, published in her Justice and the

Politics of Difference (1990), Iris Marion Young explicates claims of oppression made by

emancipatory social movements. Young provides examples of such movements including

socialism, American Indian activism, Black activism, radical feminism, and gay and

lesbian activism. Young’s aim is to “systematize the meaning of the concept of

oppression as used by these diverse political movements, and to provide normative

argument to clarify the wrongs the term names” (1990: 40). For Young, understanding

oppression is an important political move towards a more just society: some groups are

harmed by the status quo, and identifying the harm as ‘oppression’ helps to mobilize and

push towards change.

In the decades since her paper was first published, the social context of the use of

the term oppression has changed. Support for multiculturalism, various practices of

secularism, and a social norm of political correctness have impacted the experience of

oppression in Western, industrialized societies (e.g., Kymlicka 1995; Parekh 2000). And

it is in this context that groups of the far right have adopted the language and the

practices of an emancipatory social movement, including the language of oppression.

 Young would reject claims of oppression made by groups on the far right, such as

white nationalists, men’s rights groups, and Christian rights groups in nominally

Christian countries. This paper will argue that Young makes theoretical moves that leave

the distinction unavailable to her, and that this is a problem. However, I will also suggest

some resources in her view that would allow her to draw the distinction and to exclude

what I call ‘pseudo-oppression’ from the category of oppression.

In parallel with the development of the social movements discussed by Young,

groups on the far right have consciously adopted the framework and language of an

emancipatory social movement. Groups such as white nationalist groups, men’s rights

groups, and English language rights groups have used the term ‘oppression’ in an attempt

to name their experience (Atton 2006: 580). Their objection, I believe, is to the trajectory

of social norms, and particularly to emerging norms of social relations and social roles.

These groups sometimes claim that “new” norms of political correctness and

multiculturalism limit their autonomy. In contrast with the emancipatory social

movements of the left, these groups benefit from the conservation of social hierarchy.

These groups are relatively privileged in relation to the general population, and hence

benefit to a certain extent from the unquestioned norms of society. To the extent that they

feel powerless in society, they misidentify the source of their powerlessness1. Their

ultimate aim in using the concept of oppression is to maintain a historic norm, and to

strengthen racial, cultural, or linguistic hierarchical structures, perhaps in a misguided

attempt to overcome class or other forms of oppression. In these senses, these social

movements are not emancipatory social movements, but rather conservative and

1
They may, for example, misidentify powerlessness resulting from class oppression as stemming from
race, gender or cultural oppression.
regressive movements that adopt an emancipatory framework. I will refer to the question

of how to classify this contrasting use of the term as the problem of ‘pseudo-oppression’.

This paper will argue that Young would want to criticize these groups on the far

right for their use of the term ‘oppression’, but her Wittgensteinian account of oppression

provides contradictory answers to the question of how to classify pseudo-oppression. Her

account is underwritten by a use theory of meaning, and moreover relies on a family

resemblance explication of oppression, and these features together blur many of the

plausible distinctions between oppression and pseudo-oppression. A clear definition -

perhaps involving necessary and sufficient conditions - of ‘oppression’ would help to

differentiate oppression from pseudo-oppression, but Young’s philosophy of language

denies the possibility of such a definition.

1. Social Groups

Young begins with an explication of ‘social groups’. She understands a social

group to be defined in terms of group identification. A group may be identifiable by

contrasting it with or relating it to other social groups. That is, sometimes a group can be

identified by its difference in cultural forms, practices, or ways of life. However, group

identification is usually not as simple as noticing social practices or mere attributes. An

individual may subjectively identify as part of some group, or may find herself

objectively identified by others as part of some group. Such identifications may result

from encounters with other societies, but more typically they occur through social

processes that differentiate groups within the same society. Young discusses the sexual

division of labour as one example of a social practice that differentiates men and women

(Young 1990: 43). Kymlicka points to the political choice of a language of public
discourse, which relegates minority languages to the private sphere (1995: 51, 111).

Segregation, historically legislated in the American South, but also present in the

‘ghettoisation’ of European and North American cities, provides a further example of

how differentiated experiences serve to further differentiate group identities. These

examples illustrate how social processes tend to construct identifiable group differences

within a society.

A group identity takes some set of attributive characteristics, objectively or

subjectively defined, and makes them socially salient. This marking of an individual as

part of a group comes to contribute to the identity and self-understanding of the

individual. When social processes feed identification, these social processes create

different experiences for different groups within a population. As Young explains: “it is

identification with a certain social status, the common history that social status produces,

and self-identification that define the group as a group” (1990: 44). Thus, although

attributes may contribute to the identification of a group, group identity is not reducible

to mere attributes.

2. Young’s Project

Within the framework of Young’s theory of justice, oppression is one of the

central disabling constraints that constitute injustice (1990: 39). Young’s project is not

supposed to be definitional: she considers a definition of oppression to be a misguided

aim (1990: 40). Oppression takes a variety of forms, and she explains, “it is not possible

to define a single set of criteria that describe the condition of oppression” (1990: 40).

Instead, oppression names a family of concepts and conditions, an exploration of which

will provide a deeper understanding of how and why these constitute a form of injustice.
The problem, then, is how pseudo-oppression’s membership in the family might affect

the meaning of the concept, and whether or not it ought to be considered as a family

member.

I understand Young as intending her discussion to focus on groups struggling for

change in the normative practices of society. Although she does not discuss the

distinction, it is important to note the examples of emancipatory social movements named

by Young, and to contrast these with the groups that I have labelled pseudo-oppressed.

Young’s examples include: socialists, radical feminists, American Indian activists, Black

activists, gay and lesbian activists (1990: 39). All of these groups express deep

dissatisfaction with hierarchies concealed within the status quo. Moreover, these social

movements do not idealize some historic point when the groups they represent were not

oppressed2. Instead, these movements look forward to a point in time when the society of

which they are part will be more just, and therefore struggle towards that goal.

In contrast, emancipatory social movements on the far right look to an idealized

past in which the pseudo-oppression that they are concerned with did not occur. Their

movement is deeply conservative. Their dissatisfaction is with the trajectory of societal

norms; they fear a point in the future when they may have less influence than they

currently do, and idealize a point in the past when they believe that they had more

influence. The elements of this contrast are my own, but I take it that Young would agree

that the goals of the two types of social movement are radically different. The difference

in movement type should become clearer in my discussion of Young’s account of

oppression as structural.
2
I am limiting my claim here to the history of the society the movement is looking to reform. So although
American Indian activists may (arguably) be able to look back to a point when they were not oppressed,
their appeals for reform are directed at the current society of which they are a part, and within which they
have always been oppressed.
 Young’s aim is both justificatory and explanatory. She wants, first, to justify the

use of the term ‘oppression’ by emancipatory social movements (Casals and Boran 2008:

174). The term is politically resonant, and hence adds urgency to the causes in question.

Accordingly, part of her project is to “persuade people that the discourse of oppression

makes sense of much of [these social groups’] experience” (1990: 39). Although historic

use of the term ‘oppression’ has been linked to tyranny and conquest, Young points out

that the modern use of the term relies on a more mundane and pedestrian form of

injustice embedded in “the everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal society”(1990:

41). Generally, such groups “suffer some inhibition of their ability to develop and

exercise their capacities and express their needs, thoughts, and feelings”(1990: 40), yet

the oppression turns out to be both widespread and deeply embedded in cultural practices.

Oppression manifests itself in a variety of ways, none of which are reducible to a

common description or set of causes, hence the need to theorize oppression as a family of

concepts. Young divides the family of concepts and conditions into five categories, which

she calls the ‘five faces of oppression’: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness,

cultural imperialism, and violence (1990: 40). Exploitation is an economic concept

implying that the labour of one group produces benefits for another group. An individual

or group is marginalized when the labour market will not use them, and Young follows

the feminist Marxist understanding that extends the idea of marginalization beyond

markets. Powerlessness refers to a lack of participation in the decisions that affect one’s

own life. Cultural imperialism arises when the dominant group’s cultural expressions

define the norms in society. Finally, within the category of oppressive violence, Young

includes actions ranging from harassment to rape to physical violence. The background
conditions surrounding all five faces are the same: an individual is marked as a member

of a different group and social norms depict that group as violable.

3. The Five Faces of Oppression

Although Young claims at the outset that her project is not definitional, her

language implies that the five faces of oppression at least demarcate oppression. The five

faces of oppression “function as criteria for determining whether individuals and groups

are oppressed” (1990: 64). Young claims that the presence of any one of the five faces of

oppression would be sufficient for identifying a group as oppressed (1990: 64). These

claims imply that the five faces of oppression demarcate the appropriate – and hence also

the inappropriate – use of the term ‘oppression’. Young explains, “these criteria can

nevertheless serve as means of evaluating claims that a group is oppressed, or

adjudicating disputes about whether or how a group is oppressed” (1990: 64). According

to a use theory of meaning, we explain the meaning of a term by reference to its use (See

Horwich 1995: 366-7, 2004: 355). The implication is that if oppression and pseudo-

oppression can be distinguished on Young’s theory, the five faces of oppression should

demarcate a boundary between pseudo-oppression and oppression.

However, when we examine the case for pseudo-oppression, the first problem that

arises is that the term is in systematic use by both groups. And both uses of the term

oppression appear to be captured using the five faces of oppression. According to

Young’s discussion, the presence of any one of the five faces of oppression would be

sufficient to call a group oppressed. On my understanding, the complaints of the white

supremacist movement seem to indicate that they believe themselves to be both

marginalized and subject to cultural imperialism: marginalized by affirmative action

programs, on the assumption that these make it difficult to hire white males; and subject

to cultural imperialism if, as the BNP has claimed, they are restricted by the public norm

of political correctness (Atton 2006: 578). Accordingly, the white nationalist movement

seems to be correct, by Young’s own criteria, in its use of the term oppression. Minority

language groups may similarly be correct to complain about cultural imperialism, and

certainly about the marginalization of their cultural practices. For example, the global

dominance of English media does not necessarily impact the marginalized status of

English in Quebec or Wales, nor does the global marginalization of French or Welsh3. In

these senses, white males, and English language rights can explain their use of the term

‘oppression’ in terms of two of the five faces of oppression.

The problem, then, is that Young’s five faces of oppression do not differentiate

oppression and pseudo-oppression. Her claim that the presence of any of the five faces of

oppression would be “sufficient” to call a given group oppressed seems to me to be a

problem, and to have implications that Young would be unhappy with. But the claim

seems to moreover be at odds with her methodology.

I will argue that Young’s discussion of the systematic nature of oppression, and of

its contrast with institutional privilege, might solve the problem. However, the

availability of other resources in her discussion of oppression does not change the failure

of the doctrine of the five faces of oppression to systematize the use of the term. If the

five faces of oppression can be interpreted to include pseudo-oppression under the rubric

of oppression, then, by her own standards, Young’s five faces account is allowing too

much.

3
I don’t mean to take a stance here on the empirical validity of the claim that English is marginalized in
Quebec or Wales. Rather, my claim is that dominance and marginalization elsewhere is irrelevant to the
empirical question of such marginalization.
4. Oppression as a Structural Concept

Young explains that oppression in the sense implied by emancipatory social

movements is not a simple tyranny of one group over another. In contrast with historic

uses of the term ‘oppression’, the contemporary use of the term does not require an agent

or group who acts as ‘oppressor’. Instead, ‘oppression’ in emancipatory discourse refers

to systematic economic, political, and cultural norms that privilege some groups while at

the same time disadvantaging other groups.

Oppressive structures are not overt, but rather are revealed through reflection on

the experiences of disadvantaged groups. Regarding oppression, Young explains: “Its

causes are embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions

underlying institutional rules and the collective consequences of following those rules”

(1990: 41). As such, oppression is perpetuated by blind obedience to these institutional

norms.

For the most part oppression is neither intentional nor malicious. Young explains:

oppression refers to the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a
consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-
meaning people in ordinary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes,
and structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms
– in short, the normal processes of everyday life (1990: 41).

To the extent that structural oppression implies the existence of oppressors, the

oppressors do not necessarily understand their role in the oppression. Rather, we go about

our lives in ways that seem normal and socially acceptable, and through simple

interactions with other members of our society, we perpetuate norms that are harmful to

some social groups. Members of oppressed groups may themselves participate in

perpetuating their own disadvantage inasmuch as they unreflectively accept the norms of

society.

Oppression is not always unintentional in this way. Of course, there are

homophobic, racist, and sexist acts that intentionally harm individuals. However, the

underlying claim that arises in virtue of labelling oppression as a structural concept is that

such acts do not constitute the entirety of oppression, nor do they constitute the most

important form of oppression.

Although Young denies that an oppressor is necessarily present wherever

oppression occurs, she nevertheless maintains an important distinction between the group

being oppressed and the groups whose daily activities perpetuate the oppression. As

Young explains, “for every oppressed group there is a group that is privileged in relation

to that group” (1990: 42). So although oppression is not conceived of as one group

oppressing another, there is nevertheless a benefit incurred by certain groups in relation

to the oppression.

The contrast between membership as a privilege and membership as a

disadvantage indicates a potential avenue for distinguishing between oppression and

pseudo-oppression. Whereas membership in an oppressed social group indicates a form

of disadvantage, membership in a group claiming pseudo-oppression indicates a form of

privilege. Although groups claiming pseudo-oppression may experience a level of

disadvantage with respect to some aspect of their identity, they nevertheless maintain

structural privileges with respect to the very aspect of their identity on behalf of which

they are fighting.

 To return to the problem of pseudo-oppression, the structural concept of

oppression provides Young with a reply. The disadvantage pointed to by groups claiming

pseudo-oppression, although they may be identifiable as oppressive, do not account for

these groups’ entire experience of that aspect of their identity. The white nationalist who

points to a disadvantage in the job market incurred as a result of affirmative action may

be correct to point to his race as disadvantaging him in the specified context. However, in

contrast with the structures of oppression that Young is pointing to, the disadvantage

results from questioning and revising norms, habits, and symbols, rather than from blind

obedience.

Young has resources in her account to explain the difference between uses of the

term oppression, but Young’s employment of a use theory of meaning is nonetheless

problematic. In whatever ways the use of the term ‘oppression’ may differ between the

political far right and the political left, the mere fact that they are used in these ways has a

bearing on the meaning of the term. If the use of the term is taken as a starting position,

some uses of the term might nonetheless turn out to be incorrect. The use theory of

meaning does not rely on the absolute normative pull of any and all language use

(Horwich 1995: 367-8). But in this case the systematic nature of the misuse seems to

preclude this avenue of exclusion. If Young’s analysis of the uses of the term that she is

concerned with is taken seriously, then pseudo-oppression ought to be classifiable as a

deviant use of the term, and so something has gone awry.

The end result of Young’s explication of the concept of oppression is a set of

contradictory answers to the question of pseudo-oppression. As I understand it, the

problem stems in part from the fact that she takes the use of the term by emancipatory
social movements as a given. Methodologically, taking the use of such a politically

charged and powerful term as a starting point makes it nearly impossible to identify any

systematic use of the term as deviant. But the problem is exacerbated by another aspect of

Young’s Wittgensteinian methodology, which is her use of a family resemblance

explication of oppression. Inasmuch as pseudo-oppression resembles oppression, and

inasmuch as they share some characteristics, the concepts are related.

And herein lies the problem. The term oppression has a mobilizing effect rooted

in an urgent claim. And the choice to use the term –by both the oppressed and the

pseudo-oppressed – is therefore a deliberate political move designed to prompt action. It

is not accidental that groups on both sides of the political divide choose this terminology.

Within this framework, inasmuch as the far right have adopted the framework of

an emancipatory social movement, their use of the term has a bearing on the meanings of

its terms. And this is deliberate. Moreover, their use of the terms cannot be seen as

illegitimate on the basis of an independent or objective definition. In order to demarcate

any boundaries of legitimate uses of the terms, Young would need a non-use-based

definition of oppression. As her argument stands, and to the extent that she relies on the

use of the term as a basis for her understanding, she legitimizes what I claim are deviant

uses of the term, and leaves no easy way to shut the door to them. Young nevertheless

has further resources for differentiating oppression and pseudo-oppression. Her

explanation of oppression as a structural concept allows her to explain which types of

oppression are ultimately important for her theory. However, pseudo-oppression

nonetheless reveals a tension in Young’s argument and methodology.

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